A paper published today in Quaternary Research implies solar activity caused changes in the Asian monsoon, which in turn causes large-scale climate change over much of the globe. The paper adds to many others finding amplification mechanisms by which small changes in solar activity can have large amplified effects on climate, via ocean oscillations such as the North Atlantic Oscillation, atmospheric oscillations such as the Madden-Julian Oscillation, Quasi-biennial Oscillation, Aleutian Low, Eurasian pattern, & Asian monsoon, and via stratospheric ozone, and sunshine hours/clouds.

The regional climate correlation within the Northern Hemisphere in the cold/dry mid-Younger Dryas event (YD) remains elusive. A key to unraveling this issue is sufficient knowledge of the detailed climate variability at the low latitudes. Here we present a high-resolution (3-yr) δ18O record of an annually laminated stalagmite from central China that reveals a detailed Asian monsoon (AM) history from 13.36 to 10.99 ka. The YD in this record is expressed as three phases, characterized by gradual onsets but rapid ends. During the mid-YD, the AM [Asian monsoon] variability exhibited an increasing trend superimposed by three centennial oscillations, well-correlated to changes in Greenland temperatures. These warming/wetting fluctuations show a periodicity of ~ 200 yr, generally in agreement with centennial changes in cosmogenic nuclides indicated by the 10Be flux [a proxy of solar activity] from the Greenland ice. This relationship implies that centennial-scale climate changes during the mid-YD are probably caused by solar output and rapidly transported over broad regions through atmosphere reorganization.